Would You Buy a Used Car, Part II: Coffee with Smilin’ Joe
I ran into Smilin’ Joe the other day and asked him how business was down at the lot. He laughed loudly, perhaps a little too loudly, and gave me an answer I never thought I would hear from a car dealer. I was enjoying a double-shot-hazelnut-chocolate-frosty-latte-with-whipped-cholesterol at the time and hoped to avoid getting involved in a long-winded story, but since the couch I was perched on had an open seat, short of yelling “Fire!” there wasn’t much chance in escaping.
It turns out that Joe’s reply was the most interesting thing I heard that month.
What he told me was that the Federal Commission on Automobile Prices recently released the results of a study on the way cars are sold in America, and this report became the focus of a series of stories in the east coast newspapers, which led to the publishing of some rather unflattering editorials about car dealers, after which a prominent member of Congress gave a blistering speech on the House floor, which led to the formation of a special Sub-Committee, who investigated further and found out this shocking bit of news:
When innocent consumers in this country buy a car, the dealer makes money off of the sale, as does the manufacturer. It turns out that (after a multi-million dollar study of the situation), the buyer pays more for a vehicle than it actually cost to make.
So I turns to Joe and I says to him, “What’s all the hubbub, Bub?”
He said that because of all this bad publicity he is now under pressure to either sell his cars for less than he purchases them for, or to at least stop pushing expensive new vehicles on his customers and sell them older used cars.
“What’s wrong with selling used cars?” I asked. “Don’t you make plenty of profit off of them?”
Joe then gave me a look I haven’t seen since I asked my high school’s homecoming queen for a date, or was it the look my dog gives me whenever I fail to produce her evening meal in a timely fashion? At any rate, he replied that the “experts” studying this phenomenon have recommended that people really ought to drive cars from the 1960s to late-1970s, as they have determined that this is the most cost-efficient way to provide individual transportation for those who need such mobility.
“Really?” I said. “Have you started this yet? Are you selling old cars now?”
I could see his grip on the cardboard cup in his hand tighten and suddenly had visions of me arriving at work in cafe-au-lait trousers, but he managed to speak in measured tones. The problem, as he stated it in extremely clear wording, was that car shoppers don’t want to drive vehicles without airbags, anti-lock brakes, CD players, power windows, et cetera. They aren’t stupid, and can see that over the past three decades automobiles have become safer, more reliable and more enjoyable to drive. Despite the daydreams of gurus and bureaucrats, consumers are not interested in going back to a time when everything was cheaper except the quality of their lives.
Suddenly I felt that Joe and I had more in common than our taste in sport coats. I thanked him for this bit of news and we both went our separate ways, each considering our unique role in this drama called life in America, each of us mysteriously linked together in the quest to push this obscure planet on to its destiny - a destiny lying too far in the future to agonize over, but not too far to contemplate with absolute astonishment.
